52 posts on what matters to me

Good food vs. Katie’s wallet

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿I read a lot about the high cost of better food. I knew my food budget had increased, but I think I might need to look at better ways to eat well. By better, I mean cheaper.

The Monkey and I are not hurting for money – in city well known to have a very high cost of living, we’re doing well. Not luxurious, but well. We’re fortunate to have good jobs, to live near our places of work, and to have a mid-range rent on an apartment we love. We can afford to buy local, organic food, but for us it means a trade. Good food instead of say, a new dress or a painting for the living room.

But I’ve been noticing lately that my paycheck was running out just a tad before the next one was due. I’ve been caught by surprise a couple of times. So I logged into my Mint.com account to take a look at my spending trends over the last few months; and I was sort of shocked.

Blue is 2009 expenses, red is 2010 expenses.

From January 2009 to May 2010, my average expenses on groceries (including supermarket shopping, dairy & veggie deliveries, and farmer’s market) have increased more than 300%.

Some of the costs in there are delivery fees. The dairy and veggie service charges $3.25 per week (each) and every Peapod order has an $8 delivery fee. I can cut Peapod fees in half by ordering only every other week instead of weekly as I did for a while. But in all honesty, that’s a whopping $16/mo savings. So fees aside, the majority of this cost is really the cost of eating locally-produced, organic (or at least nearly so) food. My wallet wonders, how sustainable is this?

I’m thrilled to know that the extra money I’m paying is in fact supporting farmers in my region who are concerned with providing quality food grown sustainably. That is not a cheap endeavor. But I need to think about how to be most efficient with my own resources, without compromising on the things that are important to me: quality, fresh food and supporting a food system I believe in.

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7 Responses

It’s a never-ending balancing act, isn’t it? I know that I’m not able to do every single thing I want to in regards to food, so for now I pick a few and do that and move forward with a relatively clean conscience. We joined a CSA for the first time, and boxes should start arriving soon. However, while we do buy our meat from a local butcher that we trust, I still don’t know where the meat comes from.

(Every once in a while I toy with the idea of doing it all right, and just eating less of it. Really, though, who am I kidding?)

I know I’d still be spending more on food, I’m ok with that. But I’ve got to work on some balance. Like you say, Tara, it’s a balancing act.

The first and possibly easiest thing to change is to be sure I’m never being wasteful. That leftovers are eaten and no veggie is left to languish in the crisper. That happens far more often than it should. I’ve gotten better in recent weeks but this analysis is incentive to be sure I’m using my food wisely.

Jeff, I wish that were true. An analysis of my eating out expenses showed little change in the same time period as this chart. Though I should also count – we may have eaten out less but at better places.

Again, I will offer you a low cost of living place, low rent and all the fresh produce, milk, cheese, eggs, you can stand! Is all you have to do is move a ways South!! Think about it! Got lots of fresh squash, kraut making, fresh eggs, fresh raw milk and tons of heirloom tomatoes coming on, greens beans blooming, you name it!